In the post where I asked y’all to tell me which groups you wanted reviewed, you basically listed every group from the past 20 years. So fuck it, you’ll just get a random selection of whatever the hell I find in my “to watch” folder.

Table of Contents

Visual Review

Karaoke.

Actually, I suppose I should do karaoke in these reviews. Kara is usually a visual grade booster for groups and I don’t want the oldsubs to be at an unfair disadvantage in that regard.

Opening. Great k-timing and color choice.

Rating: Good.

Insert. The song is in Engrish so the stupid phrasing can’t be blamed on A-Kraze.

For the first part and the last part, the k-timing made it difficult to read the Japanese because it flew away too fast. But the middle part was quite enjoyable. Excellent color choices again.

Rating: Okay+

Typesetting.

They decided to translate the credits… for some reason.

Well it’s not terrible. Though I suppose I’m just unnaturally attracted to italics.

This is, though.

There’s nothing good about this.

I guess it was too hard to copy/paste signs back in the day.

Script Review

Karaoke Script.

“direction” would be a better word to use than “directions”.

How can a “heartbeat” pierce a spirit?

I have no clue what’s going on.

If you had “flames” in that first line, this would make perfect sense. But as it is? None sense maked was.

What are “turning miracles”? I’ve heard of someone “turning” miracles (I assume that’s just poor English that sprung from the phrase “turning tricks”), but I’ve never heard “turning” being used as an adjective to describe miracles.

Main Script.

From the first line, you’d think he’s talking about “bad” in the sense of “shitty”. But with the second sentence you get an entirely different picture. Not good, A-Kraze.

“Most of these teams are filled with bad people,”

“but Shogo-san’s team is made up of good guys who wouldn’t pick on the weak.”

>know

>know

No.

Needless word repetition should be avoided. Change the second “know” to “find out”.

The fuck’s a kudan? I’m trying to watch English subs here; not a fucking romaji transcript of the Japanese dub.

If you want to put an accent on the word here, it should be on the “divine”.

“lovely honey”? Good gods. That reads worse than a dime novel. I’d just go with “darling” but there are tons of alternatives to choose from.

Gotta give credit to this group, though. They injected a lot of flavor into the subs. Slang where appropriate, varied word use, accented words, the whole shebang.

Interesting way to phrase it. I’d go with “Her condition seems to be improving.” or “She seems to be getting better.” or “The color’s returning to her face.” Bunch of options there.

“So when a feather is nearby, my eyes will do this!” <- The “will” shows that Mokona’s doing a favor for Syaoran, instead of doing this involuntarily. And yes, the distinction is important.

Mokona specifically memorized the wavelength of the feather they already have. If he didn’t do that, his eyes wouldn’t whack the fuck out every time he passes by a feather.

What?

I swear to god…

The fuck is a Hoshizuki? When I googled for “Hoshizuki+food”, all I got was an xhamster video titled “Mayura Hoshizuki eats cum with a spoon”.

All’s well that ends well I suppose, but I’m still confused.

Cumming off the previous line, this would sound a lot better as “Now that you mention it, I do too.”

You should have “King” uncapitalized here. In this context it’s a job title, not a specific person’s title. I probably explained that poorly, but the point is it should be lowercase’d.

Worlds aren’t platforms; you don’t meet on them.

on -> in

The Japanese line has four syllables while the A-Kraze translation has nine. This makes it difficult to read what was being said without pausing the video, which isn’t the best way to enjoy an anime.

That reads poorly. For a fix, the second line should be “Seems that way, huh?”

Results

Watchability: Watchable.

Visual grade: C+ (Their release being in .avi did not factor into this score, nor will it affect the other oldsubs. Cuz that would just be mean.)

Script grade: C-

Overall grade: C

A-Kraze put out some surprisingly decent subs with this release. Either I underestimated oldsubs or A-Kraze were just ahead of their time.

In case you didn’t get this before, I’d like to emphasize that I’m judging these oldsubs by modern standards. You can’t honestly expect them to go toe-to-toe with subs running on best practices and technologies that have been refined for nearly a decade.

We look back at these oldsubs and cringe in empathetic embarrassment at the choices they made. And in another few years we’ll look back at 2012 and think “Geez, I can’t believe fansubbers used to do things like that.” Indeed, you could say fansubbing’s had eighth-grade syndrome throughout every point in its history. But regardless of how natural it may be, it’s still embarrassing.Back to top

16 Comments

“Kudan” is the name of the stupid familiars they had on that world, and the word textually translates to something like “example” or some other dumb shit that doesn’t fit. (Typical CLAMP horseshit.) So yeah, that ‘fault’ is understandable within context; unless you decide to fuck CLAMP’s pretentious horseshit and translate the term as “familiar”! Which they are.

And as for Mokona’s nonsense exclamations… Yeah, yet another “blame it on CLAMP” example of making translation work harder. It’d be best to simply leave it unsubbed, but maybe then people would complain that “some lines aren’t subbed!!!!!1”. But who cares about those people anyway.

However, yes. They’re still very decent subs that pass the test of time. …A little bit.

Hm, this sounds a bit like Nodame who had catchphrases unique to her character that were untranslatable (like “mukya” etc) and I seem to remember Froth-Bite adding these in onscreen. Yes, by today’s standards, it looks quaint, but actually, it did add something to the characterisation and you were less likely to localise in 2006. The whole scene was more of a literal-fest than it is now. Things have relaxed slightly.

I remember watching this series and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t an English equalivent for “kudan” as it was this one power that was in just that arc of the anime.(probably something CLAMP just made up)

I couldn’t think of anything to translate or localize that into myself. Maybe if you get creative enough…

I think I’m remembering my groups correctly here when I say that A-Kraze was runspicat’s group, who is regarded even to this day as probably the best translator ever to grace the fansubbing scene. Guess it stands to reason that their releases were a cut above.

>What are “turning miracles”? I’ve heard of someone “turning” miracles (I assume that’s just poor English that sprung from the phrase “turning tricks”), but I’ve never heard “turning” being used as an adjective to describe miracles.
The song’s lyrics refer to the planet as a ‘turning miracle’, presumably from its rotation.

>“lovely honey”? Good gods. That reads worse than a dime novel. I’d just go with “darling” but there are tons of alternatives to choose from.
愛しいハニー (itoshii honey)… The Japanese script’s partly to blame too.

>The fuck is a Hoshizuki? When I googled for “Hoshizuki+food”, all I got was an xhamster video titled “Mayura Hoshizuki eats cum with a spoon”.
>All’s well that ends well I suppose, but I’m still confused.
Not to mention that the shop’s name should actually be read as “Seigetsu”. (The chain’s sites seem to prefer the Nihonsiki “Seigetu” though.) It’s actually a real chain of restaurants in Osaka, where the Hansin Republic was based on.

And yeah, it’s hard to do much with Kudan. From looking at the respective kanji meanings, best I can do is ‘Skillful Cutters’, though even that’s awkward. Whether intentional or not, a fitting pair of meanings for the kanji are ‘Plot’ and ‘Excuse’, respectively. Ah, CLAMP. :| And yeah, it’s a synonym for ‘the aforementioned’.
At least one sub did explain it when it turned up first at the end of episode 2, but I can’t remember which.

What’s wrong with translating credits? I for one appreciate that. I specially like having them if they are softsubbed and you can just turn them off while you watch the OP/ED if you decide it’s too cluttered.

Most fansubs groups either only credit themselves (implying they are the only ones that matter or are the most important ones) or they don’t do anything with credits at all (which is also acceptable, I guess).